Author Rick Bell, who grew up in Louisville’s Portland neighborhood, one of the areas hit hardest, tells the story of the January 1937 flood that put two-thirds of the city underwater at the depths of the Great Depression.
Drawing on historic photographs, maps, log books, diaries, and personal recollections, many published here for the first time, Bell recreates the devastation and the citywide effort, led by Mayor Neville Miller, to survive and rebuild.
Modern Louisville, as Harper’s Weekly put it at the time, effectively started with the flood, and this book remains a standard account of that turning point.
Published 2007
144 pages